Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.